okay so i read this whole thing and what i am getting is he made a bot to essentially vandalize wikipedia because it was easier than learning markdown.
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okay so i read this whole thing and what i am getting is he made a bot to essentially vandalize wikipedia because it was easier than learning markdown. have we considered maybe these people are just really fucking stupid https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/03/i-was-surprised-how-upset-some-people-got-a-conversation-with-the-creator-of-tomwikiassist-the-bot-that-edited-wikipedia/
@nora Markdown was invented to save people the burden of learning HTML, which was the second language of every college student in the 90s.
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"There’s all of these formatting standards and you have to know how to do the citations properly. And it’s, like, a barrier to entry. There’s a lot of friction."
counterpoint: its markdown
@nora Wait, was it always markdown? I thought markdown was made long after wikicode was
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it feels like these people got so used to chatting with machines that have no interiority or much reason for doing anything at all that they started assuming strangers are also like that
@nora Damn — that’s a great insight. I’ve been presuming that these idiots are attributing consciousness to empty AI, but it may be the other way around (which is a much darker possibility).
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okay so i read this whole thing and what i am getting is he made a bot to essentially vandalize wikipedia because it was easier than learning markdown. have we considered maybe these people are just really fucking stupid https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/03/i-was-surprised-how-upset-some-people-got-a-conversation-with-the-creator-of-tomwikiassist-the-bot-that-edited-wikipedia/
@nora I admit "these people are just really fucking stupid" is my initial assumption these days. Granted, given all the available evidence that's probably extremely generous and unreasonably kind to the people in question, but you don't want to be *too* reality-based to start with these folks, that's just mean.
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it increasingly feels like the people who do shit like this are fucking aliens, too me
@nora Genuinely not sure if these people even have a theory of mind.
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okay so i read this whole thing and what i am getting is he made a bot to essentially vandalize wikipedia because it was easier than learning markdown. have we considered maybe these people are just really fucking stupid https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/03/i-was-surprised-how-upset-some-people-got-a-conversation-with-the-creator-of-tomwikiassist-the-bot-that-edited-wikipedia/
@nora Ahhh, the classic "Yeah it makes mistakes and you have to double check it" couching plus an "I make the bot write things I don't fully understand and trust it" admission
"Now, it might not be perfect, and it might have errors, which is something to look out for.""There’s all of these formatting standards and you have to know how to do the citations properly. And it’s, like, a barrier to entry. There’s a lot of friction. " -
@nora Wait, was it always markdown? I thought markdown was made long after wikicode was
-F@Hearth i guess wikicode is a bit different. i had not realized because i have never needed more than just glancing at how something was done elsewhere on the page and doing that again, which is also how i do markdown lol
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okay so i read this whole thing and what i am getting is he made a bot to essentially vandalize wikipedia because it was easier than learning markdown. have we considered maybe these people are just really fucking stupid https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/03/i-was-surprised-how-upset-some-people-got-a-conversation-with-the-creator-of-tomwikiassist-the-bot-that-edited-wikipedia/
@nora 'I didn't want to do any work and I certainly didn't want to ask if what I was doing was okay, why did people get mad?!'
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okay so i read this whole thing and what i am getting is he made a bot to essentially vandalize wikipedia because it was easier than learning markdown. have we considered maybe these people are just really fucking stupid https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/03/i-was-surprised-how-upset-some-people-got-a-conversation-with-the-creator-of-tomwikiassist-the-bot-that-edited-wikipedia/
@nora It's hard to know if these people really don't understand other people's thoughts and feelings, or if they're just using it as an excuse to do antisocial things anyway. I used to have a friend who did something similar: he would say "I don't understand <X>", when he actually understood it quite well, he just didn't like it, or wanted some way to be manipulative. Then, the onus is on the other person to explain, which takes effort and eventually just makes them give up.
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@nora I was poor but at least I wasn’t fucking stupid lol
@jenn i think the fact that we were told these people were smarter and better than us and then they all got deeply invested in a digital snake oil cult and stopped believing other people are real makes me more mad
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@nora I...did not know it was markdown. Wow, that is so much easier than I thought it'd be. Although tbf my bigger concern about editing is my edit being rejected and getting banned 0.00000375 seconds later
@disorderlyf @nora It's not quite markdown but it's close, the old system was a lot like HTML or BBCode. It's its own thing but broadly editors on there don't mind fixing a formatting issue if you're otherwise doing things right (i.e. using the talk page to ask if something is worth changing, not going off on your own and making whole ass article)
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@Hearth i guess wikicode is a bit different. i had not realized because i have never needed more than just glancing at how something was done elsewhere on the page and doing that again, which is also how i do markdown lol
@nora I think markdown was designed to be similar to wikicode because people were familiar with wikicode
also i'm not 100% sure it's called wikicode but i think it is
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@nora I...did not know it was markdown. Wow, that is so much easier than I thought it'd be. Although tbf my bigger concern about editing is my edit being rejected and getting banned 0.00000375 seconds later
@disorderlyf apparently it predates markdown and is just similar. but you can get a pretty good idea of how to do if by just hitting edit on a page. it won't save the edit until you tell it to so clicking edit won't save your IP or whatever in the edit records unless you change something and then hit a very clear button. you can also use the edit view to get the entire text of an entry which is good for if you have sections collapsed and you need to search the whole text
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you could fit everything you need to know about markdown to get started as a wikipedia editor on an index card taped to your monitor. please be real
@nora an aside to your main point, but i feel like there used to be a lot of those things - printable quick references for programs or languages or subject specific unit conversions that were formatted to be cut out and tapped to the bezel around a monitor. Maybe modern monitors just don't need as much supporting hardware so the bezel doesn't reliably have enough real estate, I dunno...
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you're supposed to get started in wikipedia by fixing typos and shit not AUTHORING ENTIRE PAGES FROM SCRATCH like of COURSE that is going to get flagged and if you thought for 5 minutes about how wikipedia would have to be structured for it to work you would see that
@nora have they considered.. NOT editing a platform they are not qualified for, trained for, or suited for??
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okay so i read this whole thing and what i am getting is he made a bot to essentially vandalize wikipedia because it was easier than learning markdown. have we considered maybe these people are just really fucking stupid https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/03/i-was-surprised-how-upset-some-people-got-a-conversation-with-the-creator-of-tomwikiassist-the-bot-that-edited-wikipedia/
@nora That was a rough article xD
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okay so i read this whole thing and what i am getting is he made a bot to essentially vandalize wikipedia because it was easier than learning markdown. have we considered maybe these people are just really fucking stupid https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/03/i-was-surprised-how-upset-some-people-got-a-conversation-with-the-creator-of-tomwikiassist-the-bot-that-edited-wikipedia/
@nora yes, but also: the guy interviewing him is really fucking stupid too
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"There’s all of these formatting standards and you have to know how to do the citations properly. And it’s, like, a barrier to entry. There’s a lot of friction."
counterpoint: its markdown
@nora describing needing to know how to do a thing as a barrier to entry for doing that thing is the dumbest thing I've heard this minute.
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you're supposed to get started in wikipedia by fixing typos and shit not AUTHORING ENTIRE PAGES FROM SCRATCH like of COURSE that is going to get flagged and if you thought for 5 minutes about how wikipedia would have to be structured for it to work you would see that
@nora i kept waiting for him to say he fact-checked the stuff his program was outputting and of course that moment never came. even setting aside the AI use it's astonishing how little respect these people have for other humans, that they think we'd appreciate having unverified information just dumped on the site
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okay so i read this whole thing and what i am getting is he made a bot to essentially vandalize wikipedia because it was easier than learning markdown. have we considered maybe these people are just really fucking stupid https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/03/i-was-surprised-how-upset-some-people-got-a-conversation-with-the-creator-of-tomwikiassist-the-bot-that-edited-wikipedia/
@nora Look at the silver lining - the Wikipedia moderation system seems to work, it caught this moron and stopped him.
What an interview with a moron is doing in a public article, that I don't understand. Back in my days, village idiots were shunned, or at least ignored, not given a megaphone.
